THE GOSPEL

1Pet. 1:3 ¶ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,

Over the years I have come to several conclusions about being a pastor and the message I am to preach. There are so many voices from our secular culture trying to conform our message to the spirit of the age. One of those conclusions is that the message of the first century is still relevant today. Not only is it relevant, the gospel is the power of God that makes man whole, it is the only message that contains the hope that our world longs for.

In my earlier years I felt the pressure to be an expert on just about every topic. Things such as finances, marriage, and parenting is what seemed to be what was expected for me to preach. I finally came to the conclusion that I wasn’t an expert on any of those topics. All I wanted to talk about was either the Father, His Son, or the Holy Spirit. Then it struck me; as a preacher maybe my message should be like the ones I find in the New Testament. Maybe I should focus on the message that changed my life; the message of the death, burial, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus Christ. Listen to what Martin Luther said about this in the 1500’s.
“The book of 1 Peter is a wonderful letter and a model for us. Peter begins by explaining who Christ is and what we have received through him. He says that God has given us a new birth to a living hope through Christ’s resurrection. Likewise, the Father out of pure mercy has given us everything, apart from our merit. These are genuinely evangelical words that must be preached. May God help us. How little of this message we find in other books! Therefore, we must preach about Jesus Christ, that he died and rose from the dead and why he died and was resurrected. We must preach so that the people will believe in him and through faith be saved. This is what it means to preach the true gospel. Any preaching that is different than this is not the gospel, no matter who preaches it.”
Come to think of it maybe it’s not just the modern church that strayed from the apostolic message. Maybe it’s just the way fallen man is. As for me, I’m going to stick to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.